DOWNLOAD: Vortex Rikers - One Of Us / A New Dawn

Two new tracks from German witch house ambient duo Vortex Rikers prior to a full album due around Autumn time. Until then One Of Us and A New Dawn exist as ephemeral tracks floating out on their own, two doomy tracts of dark drone rich with a sense of uneasy dangerous fragility about them, a character borne from eerie modulation and half light figures that swish through the mist, the tolling bell melodies and the haunting slash and slap of beats and hi hats. Vortex Rikers are one of the most consistent and prolific acts around with a sizeable collection of releases available from their Bandcamp and Soundcloud.  These two new pieces meld into their catalogue like appartitions drifting through fog, cutting new shapes in the gloomy fabric of the bands aesthetic. Two more excellent additions to their canon.

DOWNLOAD: Vortex Rikers - The White Queen

Vortex Rikers
The White Queen
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New Ep from these German witch house oriented dark ambient producers who I have mentioned plenty times before because they just keep producing excellent releases. Synth tones score channels through the speakers, deep cosmic whorls dredged out of their soundbanks, hi hats glittering through the foggy firmament, light trails of comets and beats like the pulsing rays from distant dying stars throb and flutter amongst the swirling layers.  It's slow moving, patient, and exact, each movement slowly unfurling and morphing into the next, bursting into  muted incandescence.

This is yet another bleakly hallucinogenic crawl through their consciousness, available for free download or just $5 from Bandcamp if you care enough to contribute to their cause and show your affection. 

DOWNLOAD: Vortex Rikers – Wake Up And Smell The Ashes

Vortex Rikers

Wake Up And Smell The AshesAMDISCS
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One of the most interesting groups to have emerged from the movement of desolate electronics, Vortex Rikers drop their third release and it's a great one.  AMDISCS have offered up another arresting take on a haunting yet mechanically visceral sound, similar to Dream Boat in the bands abilities to really convey a sense of tense atmosphere and cinematic narrative over short spaces of time.  Named after the spaceship that crashes in a first-person shooter they owe it to themselves to produce an atmosphere quickly, and the opening bars of A False Prophet conjure images of industrial gothic vistas, ghostly metropolises overseen by spectral caretakers; on earthm, in Space; the origin of their sounds is kept ambiguous; there's a cosmic drift to the tracks nudged into existance by sparse yet motorik beats, the upward motion of the tracks inducing a euphoria that gently coalesces amongst the grey, earthy sense that you can roll around in the thick dirt of the drone. The final We Live As We Dream pushes down on the drums that much harder and draws the record to climax, but neither stellar nor tera firma potential is pushed too hard leaving the ultimate experience an entirely subjective one that makes these six tracks all the more compelling.

Tracklist

01 A False Prophet

02 Wake Up And Smell The Ashes

03 Vanishing Point

04 Hope Rhymes With Despair

05 Void

06 We Live As We Dream 

DOWNLOAD: Vortex Rikers - O (Dream Of Each Other) Feat. GR†LLGR†LL

German dark-ambient/witch house soundscapists Vortex Rikers have joined up with the US slash/chop&screwer GR†LLGR†LL to bring a slice of haunted vocal ectoplasm to float through your speakers.  There's a heavy feel of Fever Ray about this, something in the way the vocals melt into the swelling synth hums really brings that looming cover art character to mind; the track summoning the same controlled power as that spinning forcefield/energy beam she's holding between her hands.

DOWNLOAD: Vortex Rikers

Vortex Rikers
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Vortex Rikers is a witch house-esque producer from Germany whose new untitled EP is available for free download from Bandcamp now.

Mixing thickly fuzz-toned rhythms and sickly chiming melodies into backgrounds of ominously swelling overcast drone there isn't so much occult to this to land it in that territory, instead it has a (possibly) subtler grasp of sound aesthetics rooting into a less controversial electronic environment than witch house: it hangs heavy with dark and portentous atmospheres that cross into dark ambient and yr less complex Rephlex or Warp tracks, the ones that are all out tone instead of all out acid. There's a hi-pitched tubular ripple in Nightmares that reminds me of the Shadow of the Beast theme music, which I posted up after getting fully into the Ikonika album: so this is an ep that also takes in an 8-bit dubstep reference too, albeit vicariously, but it also has a similar minimal, if not quite so smoothly produced, feel to Actress' Splazsh, featuring some comparatively elegant drum machine programming in tracks Dreams and O, and again, those peculiarly cavernous drips of melody. There's a lot of crossovers happening in this and it all works in its favour.

There's a fair bit of activity around this artist; the ep is due for a re-release with extra tracks on Sweat Lodge Guru at some point in the near-ish future (along with Expo 70 and Mpala Garoo who I wrote about last month), and there are several videos up for tracks off this release, the most recent being this for Dreams using footage from At Land by 1940's-60s' avantgarde film maker Maya Deren